Construction of geographical names knowledge base with ontology and production rule

Abstract

With the rapid development of the gazetteers, more and more geographical names databases has been established. Since the geographical names exit in form of records which provide little qualitative description other than quantitative information, geographical names are hardly shared and interoperable. In order to solve this problem, we urgently need to set up knowledge base for geographical names that shall provide qualitative knowledge to describe the essence of the elements. So, we use ontology and production rules to build geographical name knowledge base, where the geographical names ontology is regarded as the foundation for reuse and sharing of the geographical names information, and production rules are used to enhance the expressivity of the ontology. First of all, we analyzed the geographical names concepts and their semantics, the concepts of space and time and their relationships in geographical names to describe the knowledge structure for this field, used Web Ontology Language (OWL) to provide formal descriptions to give them explicit semantics, and proposed a unified semantic framework for description. Secondly, we established the common-sense rules and spatial relations inference rules coded with Semantic Web Rule Language (SWRL) which laid the foundation for geographical names knowledge discovery and automatic reasoning. Finally, we established a geographical name knowledge base combining both the geographical names ontology and rules established above. Through the analysis of examples we showed that based on the geographical names knowledge base the geographical names information can be well shared and reused.